Meet the Artist: Mon 24 with Rosemary Butcher. Free to ticket holders after the performance

Rosemary Butcher's choreography is perfectly suited to the environment of the Turbine Hall at Tate Modern. Always exploring new choreographic forms, her work is an absorbing response to conceptual art, pure movement and the complex treatment of space.

Saturated with ideas of journey and navigation, Images Every 3 Seconds, The Hour and Hidden Voices (Place Prize finalist), is a triptych of solo performance, film and installation. Together they log a highly personal trajectory of choreographic identity and challenge all conventional expectations of dance.

‘Gorgeous, sophisticated and, if you open yourself up to it, profound.’
The Guardian (on Hidden Voices)

Rosemary Butcher’s triple bill of short works at Tate Modern this week literally bridged the gap between dance and the visual arts. The hour-long Dance Umbrella presentation was staged after hours on the bridge spanning the museum’s Turbine Hall.

If anyone in dance has earned the right to present her work in such a setting, it’s Butcher.

Rosemary Butcher, is the Grand Dame of the postmodern British dance – she was there when it all kicked off at the Judson Church in New York in the mid-1960s and brought her response to the movement home to the UK.

Her concert ‘Rosemary Butcher at Tate Modern’ as part of the Dance Umbrella on Monday 24 October was my first introduction to Butcher’s work. I was very excited to see what was described in the programme an investigation of “the relationshop between dance movement and image through a combination of performance, film and site-specific installation”. I was dreadfully disappointed. I found the work elitist, pretentious, self-absorbed and quite frankly boring. It didn’t push the boundaries of installation, movement or site specific installation.

Images Every Three Seconds had a great light installation, but the performance that went with it was so abstract, so personal, that unless I read the accompanying programme notes, I would have had no idea that this was Butcher’s response to Harriet Logan’s photographic imagery of women during the Taliban rule. There was a sense of clausterphobia, a need to break free from a confined space, but apart from Butcher’s own highly personalised, gestural movement there were no other clues to this context. The minimalist soundtrack of what could only be described as distorted radio static was just plain annoying I thought my eardrums would begin to bleed.

The Hour was a combination of live performance and film that fell flat. The larger than life projected images in the Turbine Hall was impressive, but the images were wishy- washy, non-descript bodies in a landscape, possibly a beach (we’ll never really know), that held next to it, the dancing body. Again, her trademark gestural, personal performance lexicon was executed with great conviction, but my biggest criticism was the lack of attention paid to the space, her relation to the projected image and the sheer impenetrative nature of this kind of dance.

Finally, Hidden Voices performed by the lovely Eleni Giannotti a lithe, intense performer who seemed to me what Butcher would have been like 30 years ago at the Serpentine Gallery at her first performance installation. This piece was nominated for the Place Prize in 2004. Gianotti’s performance was flawless, she danced the work with rigour and concentration and held the audience for the full 15 minutes. The trademark Butcher-esque movement translated with ease to her body, and the physicality of the work was much appreciated. This was the evening’s highlight.

Butcher is not without her fanbase, everybody who is anybody in postmodern British dance was there, along with a new breed of art student interested in the interdisciplinary approach to performance making. The only thing I could think was that at one point Butcher gave Britain’s dance establishment a shock, but sometime between now and then Rosemary Butcher has become the establishment.

Does anybody think it's time to let the new blood in? All due respect to the innovators from 30 years ago and their blatant smashing down of dance tradition ... but I think we need some new ideas on the scene.

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